So this is the novel I'm working on now
is called The Swan Gondola.
And it's set in 1898 at the Omaha World's Fair.
And I guess that's all you need to know.
So this is the very beginning.
It may end up not being the beginning
when the book is actually finished
but for now it's beginning.
And it starts with a letter and it's dated October 31, 1898.
To a doll faced doll with a heart shaped heart.
I wish this wasn't a love letter at all Mrs. Meadows.
Here's what I wish I was telling you in this letter.
That I've forgotten everything about you,
and that I'm never ever thinking about you,
not even for a minute.
I want to say to you that it wouldn't even
occur to me to sprinkle this paper
with your favorite perfume because I remember nothing
about that extract of sweet pea, or how it smells
like springtime even in wintertime at the nape
of your neck, or the square bottle it comes in,
with its pale pink ribbon.
I don't remember you on the bench of the swan Gondola
your bare feet lifted from your slippers,
a sea green paper parasol spinning on your shoulder.
If you ever receive this letter your best
burn it before you lay eyes on it.
This letter is too conflicted Mrs. Meadows.
I never want your heart to break the way my heart is broken.
I don't believe in ghosts but maybe
I'll believe in yours anyway.
I'm trying to escape you and everything else but mostly you
and that's why I'm up in these clouds
but that's all I'll ever tell you about where--
about my whereabouts.
Your restless spirit shouldn't try to find me.
Haunt somebody else.
And when I'm a ghost too my ghost won't go anywhere
your ghost goes.
So many people came to the fair today on Halloween in costumes.
And you might have been among them for all I know.
I did feel I could see something of you
in every masked woman I passed.
There'd be a quick bit of recognition in my heart
when a woman happened to be looking up and off the way you
always did.
Not like your nose is up in the air
but like you're studying a pattern and a cloud
or following the flight of a bird.
And I don't mean to say you were a ghostly even before you died.
You were not some illusion.
You were never frail, never dreamy, sickly, doomed, never.
You were none of those things.
That's why I still see you alive living everywhere I look.
I made quite a fool of myself in front of a woman dressed
as Marie Antoinette.
Her costume was much finer than the one
you'd worn every night for the Chamber of horrors.
Hers was silk and satin and her wig looked
freshly spun and powdered.
She had that sweet habit of yours
of twisting a loose strand of hair
around and around your finger.
But it was all part of the contraption of her disguise.
With each tug of the curl she fluttered
the wings of the three toy butterflies in her wig.
My own mask pushed up from my face
and atop my head I watched Little Miss not you for minutes
and minutes convincing myself you'd
returned even as I failed to see very much of anything of you
in this stranger.
I became certain though that I knew very well
the beat of her tiny pulse in her throat
and a freckle of the inside of her wrist.
I followed her as she weaved through the street
the crowd partying for her and her grand skirts that bounced
and shimmied like on a spring.
I finally said your name, touched her elbow
and she turned.
A mask of peacock feathers held to her face
by sticking her hand.
I touched her wrist and lowered her mask.
I didn't recognize her but she recognized me.
I mean to say she recognized my sadness and her happiness fell
and she stepped back away her mask returning to her eyes.
The fair ends today my love.
I'm so glad you won't see it.
Everyone was thieving.
They're like Hansel and Gretel tearing away
at the buildings of sugar.
They're breaking windows, toppling cornices.
They're snatching spoons and salt shakers.
The fair is to be torn down beam by beam, the lagoon drained,
the carpets rolled up starting tomorrow.
It'll all be gone whether we take it or not.
All I took was a balloon, which is mostly thin air anyway.
If they will let the place fall apart,
I would visit the ruins as an old man, a better man
than I ever could have imagined I'd someday be in top hat
and overcoat and monocle.
The swan Gondola its long neck broken
would sit shipwrecked at the bottom of the dry lagoon.
The fossils of leaves speckling the winged hole.
The fairgrounds deserved to become a sad, battered monument
to every lost thing of beauty.
Sentimentally yours, I was never sentimental
before you happened to me ferret.
And then the next section is labeled October
through November 1898.
And it's not a letter, it's narrative.
Emmeline and Hester known in the counties
the old sisters Egan took their coffee cowboy style.
The ground's fried up in a pan to a bitter sludge
then stirred into China teacups of hot water.
They had their afternoon shot as they called it at the kitchen
table, sharing a slice of a wet and heavy rum cake that
gave them each a dizzy spell.
The day had been as peaceful as any they'd ever known.
So peaceful they'd only just commented on it so very,
very quiet.
It's an Emmeline in her delicate dreamy voice drawing the words
out, strumming her fingers through the air
back and forth like across the strings of a harp.
Learn to love it, said Hester because it's
the racketeer grave.
At the other end of the word grave, the house fell dark.
The sunlight at the window seemed blown out
with a sudden breath.
But with a rumble and a roar and a shattered glass
the house shrieked and shivered, its joints
and orchestra of great strain.
Emmeline's set of China long since excavated
from her abandoned bridal trousseau
dropped from its tall cabinet plate
by plate by plate smashing in an even rhythm chipping
at Emmeline's heart with each staccato burst.
For nearly two decades now the old sisters
Egan had struggled to keep the outdoors out
and the indoors in.
To preserve a city elegance in order in their drafty country
home they always removed their muddy boots
before stepping inside.
On their floors, wood planks culled from old hemlock trees
they kept Persian rugs.
Their living room every evening glowed a shade of jaundice
from the oil lamps and they strained their eyes
to read in the dim light.
Their walls were lined with books bound another.
Emmeline read in Russian novels in the original Russian
having retained the mother tongue
while Hester read volumes on medicine and remedies.
Some books tumbled from their shelves.
Balls of yarn fell from a basket to roll and unravel.
A shadow box containing the wreath
of a braid of a dead niece gone too soon fell from its nail
in the wall, the domed glass of the frame shattering.
The caged birds that sang through every minute
of sunlight fell silent.
The old sisters Egan looked at each other
to share in their shock a drama toward which
Emmeline had always been inclined but never ever
had Hester.
And they took each other's hands gripping tight.
I'm unafraid Emmeline thought, pleased
that she had at least this last sublime split second of Hester
seeking ease.
Despite all this wreckage and some chimney bricks that
dropped into the hearth and choked the parlor with smoke
and soot, the old sisters Egan realized
the house wasn't being lifted from its moorings
by an unlikely late autumn tornado,
something had fallen upon them.
Hester opened the front door and took a slow step back,
confused.
Worried that the drapery before her that cloaked the outdoors
was a plot.
The entire house shrouded in an act of theft or invasion.
She lifted the rifle from the umbrella
stand and cradled it, softly scratching her cheek
with the end of the barrel.
Emmeline recognized the pale yellow gray fabric
that hung before them.
Oh, she said, Hester, it's silk.
She reached out the door and stroked the silk
with the backs of her fingers.
They put on the new coats they bought for travel
to the fair last month, the black sleeves and shoulders
fashionably over puffed.--
The coats had felt so conspicuous
they'd ended up not wearing them to the fair after all
and had never once worn them even off the farm.
They stepped into the silk, lifting it, swimming out,
hunkering down nearly crawling to the other side.
With the barrel of her rifle, Hester
pushed the drape of the silk from her path.
Once they had stepped away from the house they looked up.
They might have begun to worry over
the damage that had been done had they not
been so overwhelmed by the sight of this deflated balloon
consuming, concealing their farmhouse.
They walked arm in arm backward to take it
all in leaning in toward each other
their heads lifted to the roof, to the sky.
They witnessed so much during their lives in the farm.
One summer they'd murdered a herd
of cattle shooting them to spare them
death from a painful disease.
They'd lost crops to plagues of weevils and worms.
They'd built raging fires and fruitless efforts
to ward off a freeze.
They'd come to Nebraska together lured by promise of plenitude
but there had been no mercy.
The farm had given them little and had taken much
of what they brought with them.
But this fallen ruined balloon, it
seemed a generosity of spirit dropped
down upon them from heaven finally at least
a worthless senseless bit of wonder.
Emmeline and Hester listened to the gentle rippling
of the silk sounding like wind on wheat fields.
Escaped the circus, Hester wondered.
When Hester squinted she can nearly
imagine the grayish silk as the skin of a runaway elephant
popped with a pin.
At the end of the front lane was a stone bench no one ever
sat upon and they sat on it to watch the balloon do nothing.
Surely any minute now they'd be overrun
by people from town, the curiosity seekers who
might have caught sight of the balloon falling.
But so rarely did people look up at the sky.
Their eyes were always cast down on that stubborn Earth.
Was the skies endlessness too unsettling?
Esther glanced across the horizon
at a train on a distant track.
Some days she could hear its clattering,
the sound small, minuscule almost unheard like the tick
and were of a pocket watch.
The old sisters Egan and all the strangeness and clamor
didn't realize just then they'd seen this balloon before
and that they knew well of its origins.
It was a relic of the Civil War.
At the Omaha World's Fair war balloons
had been tethered to the tops of a few buildings for display
balloons that had been used by both sides for spying
and surveying.
And this one, the Confederate one,
had been sewn from silk that would otherwise
have been used for dresses.
When Hester had heard the guide speak of dress silk
she pictured all the pretty belles
of the South carrying armloads of gowns to the war cause.
She'd pictured the women looking as Emmeline had
looked when she'd been young.
She'd pictured rows of women with scissors
picking it stitches, dismantling the dresses,
then restitching the wrecked skirts
and bodices, the monogrammed handkerchiefs
and ruffled bloomers into a vast delicate patchwork quilt.
But before the illusion could linger long,
the speaker in the hall corrected it.
Dress silk he repeated not silk dresses.
And as the crowd giggled, the image of ladies sacrificing
faded away collectively.
The pilot, Emmeline said with a start.
Where?
Hester said.
Well, I don't know, she said.
But wouldn't there be one?
The women leapt from the bench and walked
to where the balloons ropes led them
to the other side of the house.
The brittle shards of dry grass crackled beneath their boots.
They discovered the wicker basket upright on the ground.
It tipped just slightly empty but for a bottle of perfume
that it somehow kept from falling out
extract of sweet pea, stoppard with a cork its neck knotted
round with a rose colored ribbon.
As the old sisters Egan scanned the landscape
seeking survivors or victims, Emmeline uncorked the bottle
and dabbed fingertips of scent to the inside of her wrist.
Emmeline and Hester walked in opposite directions searching.
Before catching sight of the pilot,
Emmeline discovered a slightly cracked mask
of papier-mache in the dirt.
Crouching she picked up the mask with a chin
with her finger and thumb.
The face hadn't much character.
A simple pink face with puckered red lips
and wide curious childlike eyes of blue.
She held it to her own face to see
how things looked through the tiny pinholes
and she scanned the horizon.
It was then she found the pilot.
He was alive, flat on his back on the ground not far off,
his fists and his jaw clenched tight,
his left leg in an awful bend.
Why wouldn't he just scream, Emmeline wondered.
Why doesn't he beg us for help?
Maybe she considered he mistook the tall shoulders
of their high fashion coats for the dark wings of death angels.
Maybe he suspected them of scavenging for souls.
Emmeline squatted next to the man as
has to press the point of arrival
to the man's left temple.
Emmeline pushed the end of Hester's gun away
and she took the man's hand.
She whispered a lie in his ear.
Your leg isn't broken, she said.
I can fix whatever's sick, the man
said, appearing delirious, heady from pain.
He snapped his fingers and a card
slipped out from up his sleeve.
B Ferret Skerritt, the card read, Omaha, Nebraska.
And on the back this sleight of hand you just witnessed
is only a hint of my wizardry.
Emmeline removed her fancy coat and laid on the ground.
The old sisters Egan lifted the pilot his body between them
and put him atop the coat.
They then carried him in the sling of it
like on a stretcher to the barn where Hester
kept an apothecary cabinet, veterinary implements,
strips of muslin, tins of ether.
And I'll stop there.
[APPLAUSE]